Friday, May 19, 2006

Film Reviewers misled BoggyWoggy to blog that the Dan Brown Code, oops sorry Da Vinci Code flopped on the big screen, because the director failed to interprete the masterpiece in pictures. The critics gave the film thumbs down. But guess what, The Da Vinci Code is a box office hit!

I love treasure hunt movies, especially when there's a Library Scene. In a Library Scene, characters sit around in a musty old library hunting through ancient books -- preferably the kind with latches and locks on the front -- solving puzzles from the ages. The Indiana Jones movies are full of Library Scenes, and even the Tomb Raider movies took an earnest stab at them.

Ron Howard's new film, The Da Vinci Code, has them, too, but Howard drains the breathless wonder from these scenes, directing them with the same bland, even tone as the rest of the film, even the chase scenes; he's the film director as auto pilot. (All his films have the same lifelessness, from holiday blockbusters like The Grinch to Oscar bait like A Beautiful Mind.)

Even worse is the screenplay by the lamentable Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar for the horrible A Beautiful Mind (2001) but also wrote the equally horrible Batman & Robin (1997). Ostensibly aimed at six year-olds and mental vegetables, the script explains everything twice, spelling out the big words three times, so that even if you've never heard of Jesus or Mary Magdalene you can still figure out this story.

In it, Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is called in to help investigate a murder in the Louvre. He meets Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), who warns him that the investigating officer (Jean Reno) is trying to pin the murder on him. The pair flits around the Parisian night, following a trail of clues, trying to discover the reason behind the murder. It leads to a giant conspiracy, a huge cover-up perpetuated by a secret society within the Catholic Church. And though the codes were dreamed up by a Frenchman, they're conveniently written in English!